I caught the middle of a Stephen Colbert interview on NPR yesterday. It was the re-run of an interview from early June where Colbert talked about his role in the Stephen Sondheim* play "Company." The portion of interview below was really interesting to me.
Colbert: You open up and use muscles that you don't think of as malleable, and you spend a lot of time thinking about your soft palate and opening up your sinuses, and it is almost impossible for someone to explain why that's important, how you can turn your head into a bell. But that's what - at least for me, that's what we kept on working on is trying to get the things like resonance and projection and relaxation and just breathing.
And then you have to forget all of it and sing, or as - my voice coach is Liz Caplan, and Liz would say - we would work and work and work. We worked for months. And then she said: Oh, just sing stupid. It was just a few days before we went. She goes: Just sing stupid.
Just sing like you don't - like we've never discussed any of this and just make every mistake you can think of but just sing the song with all your heart. And that was the first breakthrough I had, about a week before I had to do it. The way I sang it completely changed.
And I'm incredibly grateful to her for encouraging me to sing stupid, which was really just to sing with feeling and don't think about everything you're doing, a little less thinking, a little more feeling, I'm just quoting Momma.
I think writing stupid or creating stupid could also be beneficial. Adding a bit of rawness to a field that is usually so polished and disaffecting. A moment of thrashing and making something that will actually resonate is better than the most deeply researched work. Besides, polish can be added latter, emotion can't. And things come together in the execution.
So when you're thinking—think stupid.
*Funny how SS has cropped up twice in my life recently.